


pilgrimage

by pearthery



Category: Gintama
Genre: Imagery, M/M, Space Metaphors, Stars, sakamoto's arm, tatsuma brand pining, the best kind of pining, there is a little dude there for tatsuma to talk to so he wont be lonely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25166554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearthery/pseuds/pearthery
Summary: In the damp evening, Tatsuma waves down a farmer's cart. The ground beneath his sandals looks wet and dark, fresh mud rising from the rain puddles. The air is cool, and soft.In the dying days of the war, Tatsuma makes his way to Edo.
Relationships: Sakamoto Tatsuma/Sakata Gintoki
Comments: 9
Kudos: 51





	pilgrimage

**Author's Note:**

> did i struggle with sakamoto's character voice? yes. did that stop me in my mission to write sakagin? no. welcome to 15 hundred words of sakamoto just doing his thing before he went to space, i'm so sorry

_The biggest stars look at me with your eyes. _— Here I Love You, Pablo Neruda__

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In the damp evening, Tatsuma waves down a farmer's cart. The ground beneath his sandals looks wet and dark, fresh mud rising from the rain puddles. The air is cool, and soft. It's even colder against his cheek when the oxen begin to heave, and even softer when he leans back in the rough cart and there is nothing behind him to hold him up. He breathes out into the dusk and steam forms briefly in front of his face.

His arm throbs at his side, as it has for the entire afternoon. The skin around the wound is reddened, and Tatsuma thinks it might be swollen, though he can't check through the bandages, and is a bit too distracted by the rasp of scabbing skin to think about built-up fluid in his arm. Tatsuma doesn't really want to think about bodily fluids at all, not when he's seen all kinds splattered across the battlefield and smudged across white cloth. Sometimes, the sluggish crawl of liquid on skin features in his dreams. He turns his head and appraises the cart.

It's a sturdy thing, though it doesn't have any walls. Very robust. When it was new, it must have been handsome, strong planks and smooth wheels. Very well-loved and very well-used. The wood grain is elegantly patterned, with warbling strips of honey interposed with the cream. It might be pine. 

Tatsuma's dealt with pine before, once or twice. Pine can be marketed well, with the right words: strong and elastic, durable when not in direct contact with earth and water, a great resistance to shock. It can get rot, though, and mould, because the sap is a good food supply for those things.

Speaking of food, Tatsuma doesn't have any. He doesn't have anything, honestly, besides his flimsy flask. It was kinda stupid of him to split off from Gintoki without anything to stave away his hunger but in Tatsuma's defence, it's hard to think of anything else when those red, red eyes meet yours. Resting against his stomach, his wrist twinges, so he bites the inside of his cheek to chase the ache away. 

"Hey," says one of the other men in the cart. "Uh, you look hungry, d'you want—" 

"Yes please!" says Tatsuma. "I haven't eaten since yesterday, I'm really hungry!" 

Even limited to a single arm, he scoffs the food down quicker than the flavour can sit on his tongue, which is faster than he's ever been on the battlefield. No one makes a sly jab at him, or tries to throw a chopstick at him, or even tells him that he'll have to lick slop off the ground if he spills even a single drop, which is a great relief, but the salted fish tastes bland to even Tatsuma's tongue, long accustomed to rice gruel. Maybe he's been spoiled—a few days ago, he was eating curry, such a luxury now, around a campfire, with people who looked at him like he was fragile. Ah, either way, he is sated at least. 

"I'm Sakamoto," he offers happily to the man sitting next to him. "Thanks for the food!"

The young man—a boy, really—gives him a tentative smile in return. He has dark brown eyes and calloused hands, and pale, pale hair. "I'm Hoshimaru. No worries, I guess... Are you going to Edo, Sakamoto-san?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah! I'm going to Edo, and then I'll catch a ride into space!"

The men (all three of them) take a moment to blink, before they exchange glances. "Isn't that dangerous?" says the boy, after some prodding from the others. "What about the Amanto? And isn't space very big?" 

Their concern is nice, but the weight of it slips neatly off Tatsuma's shoulders. "Don't worry! I can take care of myself, y'know."

"Oh, I see," says Hoshimaru-san. He pauses, and silence hovers in the air, almost as cold as the breeze. His eyes dart to Tatsuma's side. "Are you a samurai?" 

Tatsuma tells the truth. "Ahahaha, no, no, I'm just a merchant's boy! But I'm smart, I promise!" 

In an instant, they relax. Hoshimaru-san's face slackens in relief and his shoulders ease out of their tension. Tatsuma thinks it's funny, because in a lot of different ways a merchant is much more dangerous than a samurai. Someone who's out to make money is a lot crueler than someone who's out on a battlefield half-dead and swinging a sword, even if they don't mean it, because people looking upwards never see the creatures crushed beneath their feet. Tatsuma knows that, but he doesn't think these men do.

"So you're heading to space for business, then?" 

"Yup. No one down here's thought much about making it out there, so the market's still young! And even better," Tatsuma proclaims, "I'm going to find my place out there."

Space is wide, and vast. Tatsuma thinks that maybe there might be a corner in that dark place that is far enough away from the battlefield. If there is, then he will go there. 

"You're very loud, aren't you, Sakamoto-san," says Hoshimaru-san. His brow is oddly creased for such a young man, and he breathes deeply as if in meditation. In, out. In, out. In the war, they often told the soldiers to breathe before battle, almost like swallowing air, actually–to get the blood flowing and the mind secure. In the aftermath, they told the injured to breathe deeply too–to reduce the pain, and (maybe) to remind the living that they are not dead. He is familiar with both. 

"Ahahaha! I guess you could say that," Tatsuma replies cheerily. "People can't stand to listen to me very long! Ah, but Kintoki did sometimes. Every now and then, he even talked back. I really miss him! Actually, y'know, Kintoki was the one to suggest I go into space!"

"Oh," says Hoshimaru-san, watching the other two men play UNO with a shiny deck. "I wonder why."

"My father, he was a very wealthy merchant, in Tosa—hey, have you ever been to Tosa?—and he showed me this thing called a telescope one day! Yeah, it was some sort of Amanto technology! It was huge, and he let me take a look through it—oh, he had to sell it afterward—but while we had it, I could use it to look far out into the sky!"

"That's really interesting, Sakamoto-san," says Hoshimaru-san. 

"Yeah! Yeah! The planets are so large! I really can't wait to get up there, I bet I could find a star brighter than Kintoki's stupid hair! I'll take a picture for him and show him he isn't as special as he thinks!"

"Okay," says Hoshimaru-san. 

"He goes around with this smug look, thinking he's too good for everyone! I'll show him! Just because he, Zura and Takasugi-kun have their little inside jokes and restricted membership plans, it doesn't mean I'm not just as important! I'll become the most successful businessman and they'll be begging for me to pay off their bar tabs!"

"Hm," says Hoshimaru-san. 

"Huh?" says Tatsuma. "Are you getting tired, Hoshimaru-san? You can have my hat, if you want? It's soft and I didn't sweat a lot today."

"No, no, it's okay! It's—it's okay. You can keep talking. Tell us more about your friend. Kintoki, right? Uh, what's he like?"

Tatsuma opens his mouth, and then he pauses, and then he breathes. He looks down and thinks about the feeling of his sword in his hands, and then the feeling of Gintoki's hands in his, and how they are very close to being the same thing. 

With his eyes, he traces the calluses on his palms, and the way the creases splay out, like pine wood grains and the trailing tails of comets in the atmosphere. In his mind, he remembers the warm weight of someone else's arm resting against his. He thinks about a deep, bloody gash, and Gintoki's red, red eyes turning away. He thinks about silver hair and roughly spoken, honest words.

"He's a good sorta guy," Tatsuma says. "Too good for this planet."

"Uh," says Hoshimaru-san, "I thought he was too smug and full of himself?"

"I wanted to take him to space with me," Tatsuma continues, "but he wanted to stay here. Kintoki's stubborn, y'know. He does his own thing. But he's got this way of staying with you, this way of making you feel like he's always at your back. You know what he said to me? He said he'd wait for me on Earth. He'll even fish me back up if I fall. That's really special, right? So Kintoki's really special to me." 

It's not quite a revelation, but it feels like a release to say it out loud, so Tatsuma laughs. He laughs because Gintoki is special to everyone. He laughs because otherwise he might cry.

He laughs because he is tired of war, and he laughs because he is leaving it behind, and he laughs because he knows that his friends are alive, and he laughs because he is relieved, and he laughs because there is someone to hear him out. 

When he quiets, Hoshimaru-san looks at him, dark-eyed and pale-haired. "That's some guy." He says at last. 

"Yeah," Tatsuma says, softly. "Some guy."

The stars hover above the final strands of sunlight in the sky, and they look very close. Tatsuma sits cross-legged on the rattling cart and meets their eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> if i am right and i am likely not, hoshimaru should mean star-boy. is this intentional? yes. is this an introspective and intelligent choice? no. 
> 
> i absolutely think that excerpt is fundamentally sakamoto!!!
> 
> edit: i am slowly learning how to use html to format my work!


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